Effects of iconicity and semantic relatedness on lexical access in american sign language.

Bosworth, Rain G.; Emmorey, Karen

doi:10.1037/a0020934

Cited by 58 publications

(63 citation statements)

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“…This view is supported by the fact that structural iconicity has been observed across a wide range of sign language phenomena including the representation of plurals by reduplication (39), of pronouns by using pointing signs toward structured areas of space (8,9,40,41), of agreement markers (9), as well as of metaphors (42,43), and thus may be a general property of signing systems. Moreover, the precise nature of the mapping biases that sign languages appear to use suggests an iconic and nonarbitrary mapping between telic structure and visual structure.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Event representations constrain the structure of language: Sign language as a window into universally accessible linguistic biases

Strickland

Geraci

Chemla

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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According to a theoretical tradition dating back to Aristotle, verbs can be classified into two broad categories. Telic verbs (e.g., “decide,” “sell,” “die”) encode a logical endpoint, whereas atelic verbs (e.g., “think,” “negotiate,” “run”) do not, and the denoted event could therefore logically continue indefinitely. Here we show that sign languages encode telicity in a seemingly universal way and moreover that even nonsigners lacking any prior experience with sign language understand these encodings. In experiments 1–5, nonsigning English speakers accurately distinguished between telic (e.g., “decide”) and atelic (e.g., “think”) signs from (the historically unrelated) Italian Sign Language, Sign Language of the Netherlands, and Turkish Sign Language. These results were not due to participants' inferring that the sign merely imitated the action in question. In experiment 6, we used pseudosigns to show that the presence of a salient visual boundary at the end of a gesture was sufficient to elicit telic interpretations, whereas repeated movement without salient boundaries elicited atelic interpretations. Experiments 7–10 confirmed that these visual cues were used by all of the sign languages studied here. Together, these results suggest that signers and nonsigners share universally accessible notions of telicity as well as universally accessible “mapping biases” between telicity and visual form.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Event representations constrain the structure of language: Sign language as a window into universally accessible linguistic biases

Strickland

Geraci

Chemla

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…In contrast to Thompson et al [21], Bosworth & Emmorey [22] found no effect of iconicity on sign recognition, as assessed by lexical decision (i.e. decide whether a given form is an existing sign).…”

Section: Structure-mapping Theory and Iconicitymentioning

confidence: 77%

“…However, for the target sign BOOK, the structural correspondences involve the properties of an object: the hands correspond to the halves of a book when opened. A post hoc analysis by Bosworth & Emmorey [22] suggested that a general similarity in the type of structural overlap was not enough to increase priming. That is, prime -target pairs with a generally similar mapping (e.g.…”

Section: Structure-mapping Theory and Iconicitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The results revealed that deaf signers made faster 'yes' decisions for signs in which the handshape mapped to how the referent object BOOK WRITE LIBRARY RAT Figure 4. Illustrations of the ASL signs from [22]. [21] and indicate that meaning-based sign recognition tasks are sensitive to the effects of iconic structure mapping, although the effects appear to be relatively specific, rather than pervasive (i.e.…”

Section: Structure-mapping Theory and Iconicitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Iconicity as structure mapping

Emmorey

2014

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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176

113

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Linguistic and psycholinguistic evidence is presented to support the use of structure-mapping theory as a framework for understanding effects of iconicity on sign language grammar and processing. The existence of structured mappings between phonological form and semantic mental representations has been shown to explain the nature of metaphor and pronominal anaphora in sign languages. With respect to processing, it is argued that psycholinguistic effects of iconicity may only be observed when the task specifically taps into such structured mappings. In addition, language acquisition effects may only be observed when the relevant cognitive abilities are in place (e.g. the ability to make structural comparisons) and when the relevant conceptual knowledge has been acquired (i.e. information key to processing the iconic mapping). Finally, it is suggested that iconicity is better understood as a structured mapping between two mental representations than as a link between linguistic form and human experience.

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“…The role of iconicity in processing the language and lexical access is under debate (Bosworth & Emmorey, 2010), and it is thus important to be able to control for this when selecting experimental stimuli. However, iconicity is not a simple binary property, and the relation between the form and the meaning of a sign may be of several different types (Taub, 2001).…”

Section: Type Of Sign and Iconicitymentioning

confidence: 99%

LSE-Sign: A lexical database for Spanish Sign Language

et al. 2015

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The LSE-Sign database is a free online tool for selecting Spanish Sign Language stimulus materials to be used in experiments. It contains 2,400 individual signs taken from a recent standardized LSE dictionary, and a further 2,700 related nonsigns. Each entry is coded for a wide range of grammatical, phonological, and articulatory information, including handshape, location, movement, and non-manual elements. The database is accessible via a graphically based search facility which is highly flexible both in terms of the search options available and the way the results are displayed. LSE-Sign is available at the following website: http://www. bcbl.eu/databases/lse/.Keywords Sign language . Lexical database . Spanish Sign Language (LSE lengua de signos española) . Stimulus material Psycholinguistic research on sign language has traditionally focused on investigating whether spoken and sign language processing are governed by similar or different cognitive mechanisms and underpinned by similar or different neuroanatomical substrates. Studies have looked into various aspects of processing in signed languages and these findings so far have shown that lexical access in signed languages is broadly affected by similar features to those in spoken languages (for an overview see Carreiras, 2010). Previous work has confirmed the fundamental distinction between form and meaning through Btip of the finger^experiences (Thompson, Emmorey, & Gollan, 2005), the role of morphological complexity (Emmorey & Corina, 1990) and of phonological parameters (Gutiérrez, Müller, Baus, & Carreiras, 2012), semantic interference effects (Baus, Gutiérrez-Sigut, Quer, & Carreiras, 2008), familiarity and phonological neighborhood (Carreiras, Gutiér-rez-Sigut, Baquero, & Corina, 2008), and cross-language interactions in bimodal bilinguals (Kubus, Villwock, Morford, & Rathmann, 2014;Morford, Kroll, Piñar, & Wilkinson, 2014;Morford, Wilkinson, Villwock, Piñar, & Kroll, 2011).While many of these findings provide parallels for what is already known about spoken languages, results that are puzzling, inconclusive or contradictory to previous findings have also been found. For instance, priming studies with sign languages have shown the expected facilitatory effect of a semantic relation (Mayberry & Witcher 2005) but not always clear effects of the phonological parameters. Phonological parameters (location, handshape, and movement) influence sign recognition in a different manner, with some parameters showing an inhibitory effect and others showing facilitation Gutierrez, Williams, Grosvald, & Corina, 2012; see also Caselli & Cohen-Goldberg, 2014, for a computational model). Furthermore, results are not consistent: for example, some studies have found location to have an inhibitory effect on lexical retrieval (Corina & Hildebrandt, 2002;Carreiras et al., 2008), while other studies have found a facilitatory effect of location combined with movement (Baus, Gutiérrez & Carreiras, 2014;Dye & Shih, 2006 results that are inconclusive or do not sit well...

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Effects of iconicity and semantic relatedness on lexical access in american sign language.

Cited by 58 publications

References 50 publications

Event representations constrain the structure of language: Sign language as a window into universally accessible linguistic biases

Event representations constrain the structure of language: Sign language as a window into universally accessible linguistic biases

Iconicity as structure mapping

LSE-Sign: A lexical database for Spanish Sign Language

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